Technology and Eating Disorders

Technology has changed our lives in ways that we don’t often think about. Remember when the only way to look something up was in a book? Or the only way to access the Internet was on a desktop computer? Now we have uninterrupted access to information that’s always easy to seek out -- even when it may not be good for us.

Information access, for example, is not always such a good thing when it comes to eating disorders. In a recent article at Thefix.com, a website covering addiction and recovery, a colleague, Diana Freed, discusses how technology can be detrimental to people with eating disorders. She describes working with a 24 year-old woman who constantly checks her iPhone -- a phone loaded with apps that count calories, record her weight, and track her body mass index and body fat. Though the patient severely restricts her own food intake, she has also downloaded onto her iPhone recipe apps that she can look at and think about. In other words, at the same time she is seeking treatment to help her alter her preoccupation with weight and food, technology makes it easier for her to constantly retrieve images and information fueling the very impulses she is seeking to change.

Freed’s article raises an array of technology-related issues that I need to consider in my work. It’s important to know how much time a patient is spending on the Internet or engaging in social media, and what he or she believes to be getting from those experiences. Does using a certain app make you feel worse about yourself? Or are there apps you can use in the service of recovery? These are just two of the questions about technology that I and other psychologists must now explore.